Maybe in the future/present one could provide a service of just being a 100% verifiable real person.
A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
31–40 of 150 posts
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#32My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.) The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutti…
So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person com…
These kinds of businesses are common for scams, by kind of business I mean “urgent” ones: such as a locksmith, or garage door repair. In either case its unlikely you already know/have one, and you urgently want the issue fixed, so you’re most likely to search google and pick the one with the most reviews.
I had this happen to me with the garage door case, dude showed up, different name on card than the van, and different than who I even called. Searching google maps for “garage door repair” turned up tons of businesses with fake sounding names, all a ton of fake 5 star reviews.
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#33My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.) The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutti…
> GBP
Google Business Profile. its common courtesy to use the full name with the first use, THEN abbreviate.
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#34These fake reviews are easier to identify. No profile photo, they typically have one or two 5 star reviews. If you click on few reviews of a business and if you see this pattern then most likely they are fake. In the past I want to choose a mover and this particular business has 4.9 stars with over 300 reviews. There is no way a mover can have this rating. I clicked on atleast 50 reviewers and all of them have only o…
Your fake-meter is trivially easy to bypass with a few 3- and 4-star reviews and a fake DALL-E profile photo. This is already seen quite often in the wild.
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Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#35My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.) The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutti…
This is interesting. I'm curious how do they achieve the opposite, i.e. deleting dozens of legitimate reviews from legitimate accounts when they have angry customers?
What's the mechanism they use to convince Google to remove them?
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#36Do your part- make a review and put a dent in
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#37chatGPT hallucinates, Google shows fakes, not very different. Nobody can solve this problem
Wikipedia may not be perfect but I trust what it shows me. Maybe a bit naive but I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#38My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.) The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutti…
How is the address verification via street view passed?
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#39My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game. There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.) The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutti…
So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person com…
Specifically for locksmiths and garage door companies, Google Ads tries to fight back against this[0]. I've gone through this with a few clients.
However, they still let lead aggregators get verified, provided they have a local business license. However, "legacy" google ads accounts like locksmithdirectory.com seem to be able to advertise anywhere in the nation.[1]
[0]https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7167635?hl=en
Re: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The video calls must be new. When I first made a Google My Business profile, there was no verification. Not even address verification. And then I couldn't get the listing delisted from Google either (my friend made a prank listing). At some point they added postcard by mail verification. Then they added having to upload documents (articles of organization, pictures of store). And then the last time my account got sus…
One thing I don't understand is why many or most of these fake businesses weren't thwarted by postcard verification. I could only come up with a couple possibilities: - Google stopped doing postcard verification, or a loophole in the creation process lets savvy scammers avoid it (like an alternate verification method or providing a different address for the postcard). - New business entries go live before the postcar…
Getting an address = potentially thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in profit. Being creative on how you attain addresses is one of the main criteria for this business model.
One unique method is working exclusively with a local plumber, electrician, etc and HAVING THEM get you the addresses while you retain control of the GBP entity and sell them the leads.
The pitch goes like "you've seen the success I've had getting other clients tons of leads right? Get me 3-4 addresses in the cities you want to target and I can get them ranked" The client then asks around, uses their own address, etc to find them for you.